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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

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Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#11

Post by madeofpalk »

spacephysics wrote: post #7

The app is complete garbage, and the dark patterns on their mobile webpage are insidious. If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great. But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit. Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance…

It would just be "better" to call the private/internal APIs that reddit's clients use themselves.

This is more or less what Nitter does for providing alternate twitter frontend https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#12

Post by chwilson »

mrtksn wrote: post #6
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosh…

app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#13

Post by plagiarist »

mrtksn wrote: post #6
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosh…

I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith.

I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#14

Post by amykhar »

tremere wrote: post #8

Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

It would be good for users - not sure it would make sense for a company though. The third party apps stripped ads. You have to be able to make money. I think the actual mistake was having it open in the first place. You can't give away things for free from the start and then take it away.

A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#15

Post by bazmattaz »

I’m a bit hesitant to admit that I use the official app for Reddit and have used for years. I’ve used the browser extensions before and have tried Apollo app but I never got hooked.

I don’t understand all the hate the official app gets. I understand there is telemetry but i have pi hole to block most of that.

It has ads sure but I don’t really see them anymore, your adjust adjust around them.

One thing that annoys me is that notifications can be buggy. Sometimes you have to reload to see the activity in your inbox.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#16

Post by madeofpalk »

andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

This is basically lose/lose for everyone.

API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them.

Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it.

Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#17

Post by lawn »

I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI. The site itself is just garbage and the difference between the redesign and old.reddit is just so jarring, and the Android client is also garbage.

Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.

Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#18

Post by plagiarist »

chwilson wrote: post #12
mrtksn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosh…

app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

Wasn't that $50? That was kindof a silly amount of money for the state of the internet and the size of the platform.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#20

Post by kgwxd »

You can append .rss to any sub e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss you’ll never need to reskim over headlines to find things you haven’t seen and by using the “old” subdomain every item will open it a useable UI. I’m sure they’ll kill this too eventually but I don’t think I’ll miss Reddit much once it goes full Digg.
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